Searchme Visual Search

Searchme provides a search interface that provides screenshots of search results. The user interface is a flash application that mimics Apple's new coverflow display in the Leopard finder. The search options provide category filters, and relevant categories are displayed once you've typed search terms that match a category. The example here shows categories that are relevant to the search for "new york city."

Search results provide more information about the site when the user hovers over the screenshot. Optionally you may click the control below the screenshot stage to pull up text results. You may scroll the screenshots to the right to view more, and after a full right scroll, more results are added to the window, although sadly, the scroll length is not visually represented in the scrollbar.

The service is presently in beta, so the quality of results may not be up to par with search engines you're accustomed to using. It's a glossy for search. I think it would be nice to see if they could do a version of this using only JavaScript and AJAX as well. Performance is really quite good so far.